Chrome (latest) on Mac (Sierra): blank page, dev console shows it tried to write to local storage and never caught the exception when that failed (I restrict local storage and cookies based on whitelists; unsure why this would need local storage).
Safari (latest): partial load followed by a message telling me to "get a modern browser" and a redirect to download Chrome.
Firefox (latest dev edition): page actually loads, but doesn't seem to do anything and tells me to use my phone to throw planes.
Thing is, I can understand how something might just not work without JavaScript. And cookies I'm prepared to accept the tradeoff with.
But local storage? It consistently astonishes me to find sites which completely refuse to even load any visible content unless they get access to local storage, when there's no reason whatsoever to need it. And I don't just mean sites that use it as a proxy for detecting incognito/private windows (who are, obviously, trying to force acceptance of tracking in order to view anything), I mean JavaScript demos which should run perfectly fine without needing to store anything client-side but still get built to use local storage, and to fail not at all gracefully when it isn't available.
Same experience here, with FF Dev Edition on Windows. No restrictions at all, event disabled my ad blocker: No dice, just the 'Use your mobile' message.
Smart design choice to not allow arbitrary user input, just location/timestamps. Reminds me of the Smule apps (such as the Glee branded app [0]) in the early iOS days. The real-time component could be mostly an illusion, but there was something really charming in the idea that you could "pluck" something created by someone else in the world and view/listen to it.
Does anyone know a nice guide about how these things are made? Real code examples aren't really necessary, I'm more interested in the setup and choices made. (Like, how is the world made, how are the planes flying, what is the server side technology behind it, how is the 3d effect created, library or all plain webgl stuff, and so on)
Now that I'm looking closely, they have an internationalisation flaw: the dates are all in American format. "Italy 09/30/2016" should be 30/09/2016, for example.
And many Americans (myself included) say, "October fourth, twenty-sixteen." We do write it as we say it, just as you suggested. And there's the issue. Are we simply "wrong" for saying it that way?
That's a nice touch and yet it takes additional attention detail and time to implement. Which sort of makes one wonder what it would be like if browser defaults were inverted.
IOW tabs, by default, would become muted if they lose focus. With an optional flag to keep background audio playing, settable through JS.
Basically, you just put a 'stamp' on a piece of digital paper, which shows what city you are in - then you 'fold' the paper into an airplane and make a little 'throwing' motion with your phone, being careful not to let go and fling your phone across the room, and the plane flies off. Then everyone can make a sweeping motion with your phone to catch other people's planes (seemingly random) to view the stamps, and add your own, then throw it back.
Much to my delighted surprise, it renders very smoothly in Firefox 45 on this rather resource-constrained machine, in a way that stuff like this almost never does.
If they got it when it was originally released it's 2 years old now which is pretty old for any electronics in terms of where it'd sit on the performance curve.
This appears to be a bug. It was working last night when I tried it, but now I just get the same Mountain View plane over and over again. Also the planes I made have stopped accumulating stamps.
When it was working I was surprised how few of the stamps were from the bay area.
This just brought a huge smile to my face! Reminded me how connected we all are in this world. Curious to know how many of the 260K + users that were on as I was came from HN. Perhaps incorporate a visualisation of where users are from.
It keeps saying "You've made 0 planes" no matter how many I make. Apart from that it's a nice little project, it's fun looking at all the stamps and thinking about our connected world.
edit: Ok, after reloading the site it shows some of my planes. Might be a bit overcrowded and slow at the moment.
This would have been fun if I was able to catch more than MountainView California stamps. I was going to share this with the kids, but as it is, there's very little return on investment. Also, using the view my planes showed me nothing. :( Nice concept, with some rough edges.
"It was a student who gave me Francis. One Spring afternoon I discovered a bowl on my desk, just a few inches of clear water in it. Floating on the surface was a flower petal. As I washed, it sank. Just when it reached the bottom, it transformed into a wee fish. It was beautiful magic, wondrous to the behold. The flower petal had come from a lily, your mother. The day I came downstairs, the day the bowl was empty, was the day your mother..."
~Horace Slughorn, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Same here, version 53.0.2785.143 m (64-bit), which is the latest according to Wikipedia. Also my webGL is enabled according to chrome://gpu. Running on Windows 8, no other GFX issues. Firefox works though. :/
Very cool, but here's a tip - if you're going to use Geolocation based on IP, don't be more precise than your dataset is accurate. My stamp shows me as being in a city ~1hr and bridge and county away from me. Something less precise like Northern California would be much more useful than presenting that everyone who's on a Comcast Business line lives in South SF.
According to the MaxMind dataset[1], I'm correctly in WY according to my IP. I'm not sure how the Paper Planes geolocation could be so wrong, but it places me in Seattle, WA.
Hah mine took me from Durham NC to Atlanta GA 383 miles by car. I'm guessing that's where my AT&T cell service joins the wider internet or just where this block of IPs is registered to.
Yeah, it's mobile only to interact, all gesture based (of course it could be done without that, but it somewhat looses it's charm, it's only a small demo, so it's mostly about that little moment).
I made a plane and threw it, then tried to catch some and the net wouldn't catch anything, then I tapped See Your Planes and it said I've made 0 planes. I'd say this was a resounding success.
When you click on the small info button the second paragraph says "Visit paperplanes.world on your computer to throw planes into your screen". Is this actually a working feature? I did try it and it actually seems like a plane with the same colour appeared shortly after I launched it with my phone. That might still be coincidence though since there are a lot of planes.
edit: I've tried it about 20 times or more now, and I'm pretty certain that it actually works. I'm guessing all planes that are being launched at the moment are displayed live with their correct colour?
Can't believe the amount of time I've spent here. I even found a stamp from a small city in Mexico! (anyone in Chilpancingo right now?) Never thought someone would be using this there.
Disagree. It's not a website, but a portfolio. Agencies and designers have to show off what they can do and a static site with screenshots won't cut it. I'm personally very impressed.
All the more reason to have a good user experience. How likely am I to work with an agency that can't even show me their work in a functional way? Scroll is broken, navigations are broken, weird looping behavior. It feels like an old Dreamweaver site.
Agree that it's a generally different use case, but I'm trying to click through to examples of work and I went through three or four times to what seemed a blank page, returned to the homepage, and started over, before figuring out how to access them.
There are still slight UX requirements even for showy contexts like this.
Flew two planes on my phone. Both normal designs. Didn't see the point.
Caught one and then put my stamp on it, too. That was neat.
Still, I think there is a missed opportunity here. If I could design the plane however I wanted and compete with others, that would've been fun. But, I have no reason to go back and do it again, because there is no challenge.
Interesting to see that none of my planes have been stamped yet, and yet most of the ones I catch have been stamped multiple times before. Are more people joining the site / creating new planes than catching and stamping existing ones? Is there a higher chance of catching a plane that’s been stamped more times?
I keep getting stuck at "Tap to choose your location stamp". I tap, it stamps, then nothing. Can't tap again to add a new stamp, and I don't get the prompt to start folding.
Very cool. Does anyone know if the way you "throw" the plane actually affects it's trajectory? I'm curious what level of detail they are using behind the scenes for sending the planes around the world.
I suspect not... The first plane I threw pretty softy, because I wasn't sure how much force was necessary, and in a couple minutes it traveled from Washington State to Serbia.
browser version doesn't do anything except animation. Once installed the phone app, you can follow prompt to create an plane and send it away. Or shake your phone to catch one, and click to open, to see the list of cities where it had been caught. that's all it does.
Basically, you just put a 'stamp' on a piece of digital paper, which shows what city you are in - then you 'fold' the paper into an airplane and make a little 'throwing' motion with your phone, being careful not to let go and fling your phone across the room, and the plane flies off. Then everyone can make a sweeping motion with your phone to catch other people's planes (seemingly random) to view the stamps, and add your own, then throw it back.
Maybe it's just because the site is getting hammered, but whether I view it on my phone or computer, I just see a cool visualization of paper planes flying around the world, but I see no way to interact with it at all... Nor is there any explanation of what I am looking at. It looks pretty, but is rather confusing.
Ehh, I don't know if that counts. Lots of sites want me to join on my phone or download an app, even though they are desktop compatible.
I'm irked when companies go for this form of anti-documentation. It 1) makes me feel dumb 2) wastes my time 3) I'll eventually figure out what you're not telling me, so you might as well cut to the chase.
it's not that silly. We're mostly all developers so its easy to forget but most people dont have desktop computers nowadays. Mobile is the primary experience for many people.
And remember what it was like when they did have desktops?! Thank the gods they use their phones instead now. Leave the desktops to those who know how to actually use a computer.
You can't interact with it on your PC (as far as I know) but it works on my phone. There should be a little button with a plus sign or paper plane on it where you can create a new plane. Might take some time to appear on first start.
Yeah, it took a good 4-5 minutes for it to start doing anything on my phone... Would be nice if there was some fallback for when it's loading, so I'm not just staring at a 'blank' screen, wondering if anything is happening.
But given that the NSA is recording _everything_, I am unlikely to be able to avoid them. What I can avoid is the commercial sale of my private identity; and to do that, I need to not sell myself to Google or Apple.
I saw Paul Irish tweet this [0] a few days back. Hopefully this doesn't come off as too negative, but I disagree with it being a "beautiful web experience". I tried it on my Nexus 5X and it's not a smooth experience, and that's with Chrome on a high-tier phone that isn't even a year old. With Firefox for Android, my default mobile browser, it seems to struggle even more.
With that said, I think it's an impressive demo. I'd love to look over the unminified source.
It's worth noting that it doesn't appear to load properly if you're using uBlock Origin; I had to toggle it off for the demo to work.
15 minutes later, having launched and caught a bevy of paper planes, I am rocking in my seat with delight like a schoolboy again.
Thank you for making me remember the simple delights of making, discovering and connecting. Activities that filled my childhood days...